Scholarly surveys of World War I abound, yet there are far fewer up-to-date scholarly histories of World War II as a whole. For that reason alone, the publication of Richard Overy's massive history of that global conflict is very welcome. What is more, reflecting a lifelong engagement with that war by one of its most prominent Anglophone scholars, Blood and Ruins is a wonderfully ambitious monumental history of World War II that represents a tremendous achievement. Its wealth of materials, its learnedness and erudition, its scale and scope, are simply staggering. Its ambition and accomplishments are indeed expansive, as its author rightly insists on widening the chronology of the war beyond the years 1939 to 1945, on casting the war as a truly global conflict with several centers of gravity, on directing attention to the multiplicity of different forms of war and participation, and on attending to the war's extraordinary ferocity and intensity of mobilization.
Multi-perspectival in outlook and based on an impressive command of vast bodies of scholarship, Blood and Ruins falls into two parts, with each of them amounting to a major monograph in itself. The prologue and chapters 1, 2, 3, and 11 offer a broadly narrative account of the war, focusing on the period from 1931 to 1945 yet also stretching back to the pre-1914 global politics of empire and war and looking forward to the war's many violent aftermaths and the making of a new global order in the postwar period. At the center of this narrative of the “long” World War II are the making and unmaking of the Japanese, Italian, and German pursuits of war and empire, with an emphasis on the big questions of diplomacy, war, peace, and strategy, and on elites as well as the sequence and contingencies of decisions and events.
By contrast, chapters 4 through 10 offer thematic analyses of the broader experience of the war, encompassing combatants and noncombatants, armed forces, civilian societies, and broader populations, and ranging freely among the major combatant states and warring parties across the globe, with an eye toward identifying causes for success and defeat in war. Key themes include the mass mobilization of military and civilian manpower for war, the military practices and effectiveness of armed forces and their ways of war, the mobilization of the productive powers of war economies, the languages of just and unjust war sustaining the broader war efforts and popular mobilization, the different modes of direct civilian participation in combat and violence, the emotional states and psychological burdens created by wartime violence among combatants and noncombatants, and, finally, the cataclysmic violence and extraordinary criminality of a war marked by genocide and mass murder beyond any legal limitation or military restraint.
Running to nearly 1000 pages, Blood and Ruin is a real tour de force. It is also framed by a clearly articulated general argument, flagged in the title of the book. Overy presents World War II as the “last imperial war,” that is, as both a manifestation of the crisis-ridden world of global empire that had come into full being by the start of the twentieth century, and as the direct product of the Japanese, Italian, and German bids for territorial empire, which had been fueled by long-standing, ever-evolving imperial fantasies. Accordingly, Overy views both world wars of the first half of the twentieth century as “stages of a second Thirty Years War about the reordering of the world system in a final stage of imperial crisis” (xii), with World War II eventually ushering a new and different global age, defined by the final unravelling of territorial empire, the triumph of the nation-state, and the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers.
This argument is highly compelling and, broadly speaking, sits well with the main thrust of current scholarship across various fields, which highlights the centrality of the world of empire for any history of the first half of the twentieth century, including fascinating new scholarship that studies the connections between the imperial pursuits of the three “Axis” powers. But in Blood and Ruins this claim also comes with limitations. It does not provide a determining framework for all the analyses in the book's thematic chapters that Overy claims it does. As importantly, the focus on the issue of colonialism as the defining issue of the war does not do justice to other defining features of a world war shaped by ideological polarities and contests over competing visions of modernity and global ordering, of the war as a global civil war of sorts, beyond the competitive and mutually exclusive pursuit of colonial territory. Furthermore, in setting the aspiring empires of the “Axis” powers against the established empires of France and Britain in its account of the making of global war in the 1930s, Blood and Ruins falls short of offering a persuasive account of the place of the United States and its imperial imaginary in the fast-moving world of twentieth-century empire and geopolitics, let alone, of the specter of superior U.S. power and global domination that haunted the world since World War I and conditioned any post-1918 bids for “national autonomy” (35) through empire and societal transformation.
But any such limitations do not take anything away from Blood and Ruins’ enormous contribution as a magisterial history of World War II, which surpasses any of its predecessors. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested in that war and a key touchstone for subsequent scholarship.
